Imagine the Face of Psyche: A 6th Doctor ShortTrip
by That-Other-Doctor
Summary: Set between "The Ultimate Foe" and "Time and the Rani". Imagine the face of Psyche, beautiful, ageless, timeless. Now imagine a face ten times as real, as tactile as the pristine designs of a butterfly wing. That was her. That was Peri.


_"Thanks again. It's been . . . interesting."_  
_"No, you can't go . . . Stay with me. I'm sorry about what happened . . . we can travel together again! We can have more adventures, you and I! Like the old days?"_  
_"No. You are going to get into that TARDIS, and I'm staying here."_  
_"But . . . why? We have so much to talk about . . ."_  
_"We've said a lot of things. There's a lot of me about, with a lot of fates. But I think we both know my fate is here. And your fate . . . is somewhere else."_

_- Future Alternate Peri and the 6th Doctor, "Peri and the Piscon Paradox", Big Finish_

* * *

_"Peri, hold on, just a little bit longer . . ."_  
_"It's okay . . . Doctor. At least I got to say goodbye this time."_  
_"Please! I don't think I can go through this again."_  
_"Is . . . this . . . home?" [She dies]_  
_"Peri! Peri . . . no . . . NO!"_

_- Peri and the 6th Doctor during Peri's death, "Her Final Flight", Big Finish_

* * *

For as long as I cared to remember, which in reality was not that long at all, considering recent circumstances, I had been plagued by dreams. One dream in particular, pulsing through my fevered brain like a strobe light in a darkened room, unable to sate itself through my fear and my terrified self bursting awake in the middle of the night. It ate away at me like a virus, giving me just enough respite during the daytime hours in order for me to gather my strength for battle to be drawn again when darkness fell. I dreamt of fire and light and betrayal; I dreamt of the singing tendrils of time weaving their way around my body and strangling it in their grasps. I dreamt of monsters and men, of wizards and warlords, of beginnings and ends, of life and death. And I dreamt of _her_.

I dreamt of Perpugilliam Brown.

She would find her way in, eventually. She always did. As one cannot bail the ocean with a bucket, one cannot keep Peri from treading the smoky remnants of my nightmares.

She appeared as I remembered her, or as I would like to remember her. Untouched by the knives of time and circumstance, as fresh as the day I met her on Lanzarote, so very long ago: short brown hair, framing her young face, deep russet eyes that put Kauri wood to shame, and a smile forever ghosting the corners of her mouth. Imagine the face of Psyche, beautiful, ageless, timeless. Now imagine a face ten times as _real_, as tactile as the pristine designs of a butterfly wing. That was her. That was Peri.

But, when she found her way into my dreams, she was always _wrong_. She wore an Inverness cloak over a long, thin dress. They were grey and monochromatic, as lifeless as the dust caking the walls of a long-abandoned crypt. The deadened quality of her ensemble offset the light of her face and the twinkle of her eyes, making her one with my dreams of shadows and darkness, no more real than the specter of a memory best forgotten.

She would look at me, gazing through me in search for something I was sure wasn't there. And she would talk, though no words came out. I saw her mouth move, opening and closing like the muted glubs of a goldfish. But her voice, the voice I yearned so much to hear again and yet couldn't stand because of the ache of my own private shame, was lost in the smoke. Her silent words enveloped themselves around me, and froze me to the spot. It was if the memory of her voice were ensnaring itself around me, cutting like wire deep into my skin and clothes.

It hurt. It hurt more than I thought possible.

In every nuance of the dream, night after lonely night, Peri talked to me with empty words. Sometimes, she was screaming at me. She was nearly bent over from shouting as bitter tears poured down her face. She cursed the man who had abandoned her, who had condemned her to a life broken by the schemes of decadent, dispassionate, evil men. She cursed me, and I felt rather than heard the words of her hate. I felt them in my body; her silent words writhed like snakes around my palms and my fingers and ate away at my flesh. They stripped the skin until my hands were little more than skeletons of bone and sinew.

Peri hurt me, but I couldn't bring myself to stop her. I had hurt her so, so many times. I had been cruel and demeaning and patronizing, and in the end, I had lost her without ever telling her how much I cared about her, how dreadfully sorry I was.

I deserved it.

Every night, I woke with a yelp of pain, thrusting my hands in front of my eyes. They were always, of course, in tact. I wrapped my large, multicolored coat around them all the same, frightful that the skin would begin to melt away if I pushed the mirage. I would get up, brush myself off, say something snarky to myself about what a senile old man I was becoming. Senile and regretful and wracked with more shame and guilt than was fair.

I pottered about with Mel, going here and there, saving the day from your redundant stereotypical baddie, hiding my shame beneath layer upon layer of bombastic bluster and self-superiority.

It was a facade. All of it. As night fell, she appeared to me again.

The dream came, as it always did, and she came, as she always will. Peri continued to talk, but whereas sometimes she screamed, sometimes she sobbed. She looked at me, her liquid brown eyes flushed with glittering tears. She tried to touch me, but her hands evaporated into grey smoke whenever her charcoal fingertips brushed my coat. Her voice, her soundless voice, etched with the unheard wailings of grief, continued to shred me away, wrapping me tighter and tighter and cutting me deeper and deeper. I was being bled away; Peri was destroying me.

I didn't stop her.

_Oh, Peri. My dear, naive, sweet Peri. _

_ Please forgive me._

There came a time when there was nothing left of me. My body was gone. I was a ghost, a grey specter like the memory of my dear friend.

I faded away. I had no tactile existence anymore. Peri, a woman from beyond the reality of the tangible universe, had pulled me down into shadowy oblivion with her.

I couldn't wake up again. What was there to wake up for anymore?

I was with Peri again.

* * *

The next morning, I regenerated.

* * *

**(The 6th Doctor got a WTF? regeneration, so I added a little more heart to it. I wonder if it's possible for Time Lords to die of grief?)**


End file.
